Here’s a sneak peek into my upcoming book: How To Hire the Best: The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members (Releasing November 18, 2020)
The Seeds of Your Culture
Your Immutable Laws
Attracting A-Players becomes easier and easier as you intentionally develop a good culture. Every business has a culture. Your Immutable Laws are the seeds for the culture in your business.
Display your Immutable Laws proudly on your website. Incorporate them in your contracts. It’s not enough to list your Immutable Laws and share them prominently. You want to weave these into your everyday conversations with team members, clients, and vendors. How do you do that?
Storytelling
Make use of storytelling to reinforce the culture of your business. Remember the times you felt really proud of something a team member did? There’s a great story in there. Tell it . . . over and over. It’s okay if your team members think you have dementia because you keep telling the same stories over and over. You are reinforcing your Immutable Laws and creating a culture. Don’t worry. Soon you will have more stories to add to your collection. Be on the lookout for team members’ wins and successes with respect to demonstrating your Immutable Laws. When you catch them doing something awesome, or hear that feedback from a client, share the story at your next team meeting. Tie it back to one of your Immutable Laws.
Your Immutable Laws are observable outside of your company. For example, I was introduced to Brian Gottlieb by Tony Mancini. When Tony suggested I connect with Brian Gottlieb from Tundraland, he described Brian as a good leader and businessman. However, it was Tony’s description of the culture Brian built at Tundraland that made the biggest impression on me. Here is what Tony said:
His employees are fanatics. They are absolute fanatics about the company, about what they do, why it’s important, the satisfaction they get from it outside of straight compensation. To me, as you look at that next generation of workers, my goodness, there’s nothing that’s going to be more important than that. It needs to be bigger than the job and compensation, and he’s made that. He’s created a culture where it’s bigger than the job, and it’s bigger than them remodeling. It’s much bigger than that. That’s almost a byproduct of who they are.
An Impactful Culture
Imagine building a culture so impactful people describe your team members that way. Imagine people describing your company that way. Imagine making that impression on people.
Entrepreneur Diane Hatfield of Hatfield Builders and Remodelers includes respect as an Immutable Law to build a company culture where everyone is treated well. Diane believes in treating her team members with the respect with which she would like to be treated. As she puts it:
I treat them with the respect that I would want to be treated when I’m working with someone and for someone. I know what it’s like to work in a crap environment. Chad does, too. I know what it’s like to have a manager who micromanages people, talked down to people, and didn’t trust people. I worked for her for years, and it was awful. We got along because I knew how to manage her. I want to treat our staff members with the love and respect that I would want to receive . . . When we think about things with a cool, level head, and we give them the opportunity to speak and talk and put out their ideas, it becomes more productive, and it becomes a better environment . . . They’re not just our staff, our employees, they’re really valuable people to us, and we cannot do this without them. This business does not operate the way that we’ve got it operating right now without them.
That mindset ensures Chad and Diane create and protect an environment in which high performers can—and will—thrive.
For tips on how to work through these problems and coach your team more effectively, please be sure to check out How To Hire the Best:The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members, releasing November 18, 2020.
Dr. Sabrina Starling, The Business Psychologist™ and author of the How to Hire the Best series is the founder of Tap the Potential. At Tap the Potential, we work to free business owners from the constant demands of a growing business. We believe work supports life, not the other way around. Through our proprietary Better Business, Better Life™ coaching program, we transform cash-sucking businesses into highly profitable, Great Places to Work, then send business owners on a 4 Week Vacation™ to celebrate that accomplishment. After the first year in our program, our clients have more time for what matters most and more money in their bank account than ever before.
Never one to accept the status quo or back down from a challenge, Dr. Sabrina’s How to Hire the Best series grew from her desire to solve the toughest hiring challenges interfering with her clients’ growth and profitability. What sprang from her experience working with entrepreneurs in rural areas catapulted her into becoming the world’s leading expert in attracting top talent in small businesses — no matter what hiring challenges those businesses are facing — and earned Tap the Potential’s reputation as the go-to resource for entrepreneurs committed to creating Great Places to Work with thriving coaching cultures and highly engaged team members working from strengths. Her latest book, How to Hire the Best: The Contractor’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Employees, is an International Best Seller on Amazon! In this powerful book, Dr. Sabrina shares crucial hiring strategies to transform your small business AND improve your personal life. With her background in psychology, and years of driving profit in small business, Dr. Starling knows what it takes to find, keep and get exceptional performance out of your biggest investment — your team members.
Dr. Sabrina is working on her next books: How to Hire the Best: The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members (available November 18) and The 4 Week Vacation: Work Supports Life, Not the Other Way Around (available Dec 1; featuring many of our Trailblazing 4 Week Vacation™ Retreat Participants!)
